© 1997 François Le Rohellec, George Michelson-Dupont, Luc Lachance, François Dupont, Jean-Claude Romeuf, Jean Royer
© 1997 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 4 — Summer 1997 | The American justice system rules in favor of copyright on appeal |
Journal of the association L'A.F.L.L.U. French-speaking Association of Readers of the URANTIA Book
Member of the I.U.A.
Head office:
8, Passage of the Good Seed
75011 PARIS—France
¶ A word from the president
Dear readers, dear friends,
It was last April that the first general assembly of the A.F.L.L.U. took place after its creation in 1996: it was certainly a (short) assessment of the things accomplished but also revealing of the work that is to be built, because everything still remains to be done…
One of the reasons for our association is to create, through those who wish to engage in it, what tomorrow will be and which it is not possible or unwise to accomplish alone — “There are few tasks in the universe for isolated servers” (UB 28:5.14) -: welcoming new readers and promoting the in-depth study of the teachings contained in The URANTIA Book are among them. This team work can sometimes be arduous and patience fail us but “there is in the teachings of Jesus, an eternal nature which will not allow them to remain indefinitely sterile in the hearts of thoughtful men” (UB 170:5.21).
It remains that we must not lose sight of our main task without which we cannot be credible: to grow, always grow more in truth, beauty and goodness in order to give the best fruits when these are asked of us.
Francois Le Rohellec
President of the A.F.L.L.U.
¶ Summary
- The President’s word.
- General meeting of April 6, 1997
- After death
- Deity and Divinity
- The Personality
- Supremacy
- Chromosomes, did you say chromosomes?
- Freedom and choice
- The Gazette
- Readers’ meeting
❧ 1955 URANTIA Foundation. All rights reserved. These materials from The URANTIA Book are used with permission. Any artistic representation(s), interpretation(s), opinion(s) or
¶ General Meeting of April 6, 1997
It is the interest each of us has in The URANTIA Book that brings us together.
The URANTIA Book is a treasure that has changed our lives, and this treasure needs to be protected. Copyright is its first line of defense, a line that has already withstood many assaults but needs to be strengthened from without by the unity of coordinated action of all who feel committed to the protection of the authenticity of The URANTIA Book, the expression of the Fifth Epochal Revelation, which has been transmitted to us by the Invisible Brotherhood with whom we are invited to collaborate.
Copyright has been fought and is still being fought by people who want to take possession of the Book either out of pride or to market it for themselves. There are, today, sects who take possession of the name Urantia or who extract passages from it—which gives the Foundation much trouble.
This is why it is essential to form a bloc with the Foundation, the copyright holder - and this bloc must be formed by a maximum number of associations and study groups spread over the 5 continents. This bloc, embodied by the I.U.A. is the authentic reference, and it is this bloc that the usurpers will come up against.
Let us fight for unity, “If a house is divided against itself, it is soon doomed to ruin” — Let us realize the brotherhood of men by living with all our heart our filiation with the Universal Father — by depending directly only on Jesus, our Master — the elections of presidency, vice-presidency — treasury secretariat — are imposed by French laws on associations and are limited to the administrative organization of the group — they have no interference on our spiritual life where we are all equal before God.
G. Michelson-Dupont
¶ US Court Rules in Favour of Copyright on Appeal
By a judgment rendered on appeal in early June 1997, the URANTIA Foundation has won its appeal in its lawsuit against Mrs. MAAHERA and the FELLOWSHIP. This long-awaited decision strengthens the copyright that the URANTIA Foundation holds on The URANTIA Book and its translations until 2035.
Let us briefly recall the facts:
In the late 1980s, and without the permission of the URANTIA Foundation, which holds the rights to the URANTIA Book, Mrs. MAAHERA created a hypertext computer version of The URANTIA Book that allowed real-time searches of the entire text of The URANTIA Book.
Georges Michelson-Dupont
Trustee of URANTIA Foundation.
¶ After death
Is there survival after death?
The great philosopher Socrates, 400 years before Jesus, posed this dilemma:
After death, either there is nothing, or there is something…
- If there is nothing, death presents itself as a night of eternal sleep, and more beautiful without doubt than the sweetest night I have known. So, why this fear of dying?
- If there is something after death, then I will survive in another world. What joy then to see again the loved ones who have gone before me and those who will soon join me! Why then be afraid of dying?
Luc Lachance
¶ Deity and divinity
- The personality revelations of the Second Source and Center. The mind presences of the Conjoint Actor unify the spirit of divinity with the pattern of energy. The bestowal incarnations of the Eternal Son and his Paradise Sons unify, actually fuse, the divine nature of a Creator with the evolving nature of a creature. The Supreme is both creature and creator; the possibility of his being such is revealed in the bestowal actions of the Eternal Son and his co-ordinate and subordinate Sons. The bestowal orders of sonship, the Michaels and the Avonals, actually augment their divine natures with bona fide creature natures which have become theirs by the living of the actual creature life on the evolutionary worlds. When divinity becomes like humanity, inherent in this relationship is the possibility that humanity can become divine. (UB 116:3.3)
At a meeting of our reading group, a heated argument broke out when one of the members had the audacity to declare that he was divine. He only narrowly avoided lynching by denying his true thoughts.
Had he proclaimed himself to be a Deity, we would have taken the matter to the courts of Uversa. But, as we shall see, although our actual divinity is minimal and has no real value except in potentiality, to declare oneself divine is not necessarily too much of a boast. In the case before us, it was perhaps nothing to write home about.
The Avignon Group
¶ The Personality
The following reflection aims to shed light on the functioning of the personality at the level of the different cosmic, universal and divine realities. Jacques Dupont’s article offers us a broad overview of the characteristics of the personality.
This essay proposes to study the personality only in its links with other realities, put in place for the evolution, the advancement, the progress of the ascender.
Francois Dupont
¶ Supremacy
Any monotheistic religion referring to an infinite God, admits the omnipotence of God.
For the reader of The URANTIA Book as for one who, rejecting the static creeds of religious majorities, seeks to penetrate the mystery of God, believing in this is not contrary to his approach.
If, like Jung, we do not accept to speak of God by hearsay, but we try to meet him through personal religious experience, we can, in an intimate conviction, thanks to a curious observation, affirm that the Paradise God is not omnificient (UB 112:2.17), that is to say that by voluntarily limiting his action, he does not do everything that is.
Jean-Claude Romeuf
¶ Chromosomes, did you say chromosomes?
The word “chromosomes,” plural, occurs only once in UB 77:2.5 in The URANTIA Book. The same is true of the word genes, also plural in UB 82:6.7. Yet genetics and germ plasm are often mentioned. But in UB 36:2.11, we are told, “On Urantia, the sex cells of human reproduction contain forty-eight archetypal control units—the trait determiners.” This has caused much ink to flow. Indeed, in 1934 all good biology books said that man had 48 chromosomes; it was not until the improvement of microscopes that it was possible to see that man had 46 chromosomes.
All the first readers must have wondered why the word chromosome was not used and the first translator of the Book into French naturally thought it a good idea to add “the chromosomes” determining characteristics. Later all sorts of explanations were put forward, but the latest one satisfies me more than all. It is found in “La Recherche” of April 1996 on page 54 in an article entitled Karyotype and Embryogenesis. I quote:
“The three great apes (orangutan, chimpanzee and gorilla) have 48 chromosomes, while man has 46. Comparing them one by one, we see that man actually has two great ape chromosomes joined at their ends to form only one.” My conclusion will be that we should not be too hasty in saying that the limits of Revelation, (UB 101:4.1) prevented the revealers from telling us the whole truth. This little linguistic subtlety allowed them to satisfy both those who thought that 48 referred to chromosomes and to satisfy us now. Let us be sure that there are other similar subtleties. It is up to the readers to find them.
Jean Royer
¶ Freedom and Choice
Freedom, dear freedom… etc.
How many vain reflections, how many disappointments have the philosophers caused us about him!
What lies!
Who else but you, who else but me, gold seekers in the Urantian steppes, could have engraved his name on the royal and blue banner of the thoracic circles?
Six hundred and six times I have written “Freedom” on the sand of the moral choice of wisdom.
Six hundred and six times the wind of Error has erased it. He told me: “start again”. Ah! If only once to make the Choice that spiritualizes me, to become a bird… to transform myself into a feather! Then free one morning that the dew perfumes Like a drop of water sliding on a stone I would evaporate towards the suns of the Father.
Jean-Claude Romeuf
¶ Gazette section
This section is intended to disseminate information from groups of readers of The Urantia Book and relating to the life of the Urantia movement.
¶ FRANCE
Study groups communicate:
- The Paris study group: meets every 1st and 3rd Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m., passage de la Bonne Graine.
- A list of study groups with addresses and schedules will be published in the next Link.
Practical Operation of the Urantian Link
In order to facilitate the layout work of the editors of the Urantian Link, those who wish to publish in the periodical are strongly requested to provide us, as far as possible, a computer copy of the article(s) (by means of a 3.5 inch diskette or by e-mail to the following address: dronfet@mail.planetepc.fr. The most suitable format is Microsoft Word (Mac or PC) but a more basic text format can also do the job.
THANKS.
Address your articles, comments and suggestions to:
A.F.L.L.U. — 8, Passage de la Bonne Graine 75011 — PARIS — France
2nd Meeting of the translators of the URANTIA Book in Paris.
The URANTIA Foundation will organize the second meeting of the translators of the URANTIA Book from October 31 to November 2 near Paris.
Let us recall that this meeting is made necessary by the complexity of the tasks, the harmonization of the principles and techniques used and by the difficulties that languages such as Korean and Chinese raise in relation to Indo-European languages.
More than eight translations are in progress and 3 or 4 others are in the preliminary stage of forming translation teams.
Experience has taught us 4 major principles which now guide the URANTIA Foundation in its choices:
First principle: Translation is a team effort.
Indeed, it is a matter of guaranteeing future readers that the book they are going to read is indeed The URANTIA Book in their language and not a more or less subjective interpretation of a human brain. Only teamwork brings an objectivity that the friction of diverse interpretations provides. 2 or 3 people seems to be the right number.
Second principle: The team must have a long-time reader.
The complexity, the recurrence of certain concepts, the synthetic understanding of the URANTIA Book can only be acquired with years of reading and only the long-time reader will be able to appreciate and choose between synonyms to perfectly render the nuances of the text.
Third principle: The team must have a perfect bilingual.
Indeed, to be able to translate, one must not only understand the text but also appreciate the subtleties of the vocabulary and know how to translate them. Only the perfect bilingual will be able to “feel” the linguistic nuances.
Fourth principle: The team must have a linguist, a lover of his language.
This last principle will bring the linguistic quality and the fluidity of the translation. The linguist has the heavy task of making the translation as faithful as possible by using the characteristics and expressions of his language.
These are the criteria that experience has taught us. Translating The URANTIA Book is a gigantic task that required 7 to 10 years of daily and truly selfless work. Let us pay tribute to these women and men, often anonymous, who work for the spiritual progress of our humanity.
¶ QUEBEC
The second French-speaking association of readers of The URANTIA Book, linked to the I.U.A. (International URANTIA Association), will be born on July 18 and 19, 1997 in Montreal. It seems to us that this is only a fair return of things because the beautiful province of Quebec has more French-speaking readers of The URANTIA Book per “capita” than anywhere else and Quebec is the second French-speaking city by population after Paris.
On behalf of the A.F.L.L.U., we wish our brothers in Quebec success in their undertakings. Selfless service brings the greatest joys possible and we sincerely hope to be able to collaborate with them within the French-speaking world to make known this wonderful book that is The URANTIA Book and the teachings it reveals.
¶ The I.U.A. in a few figures
There are now 23 URANTIA Book reader associations throughout the world connected with the I.U.A.
16 in the USA, 3 in Canada, 1 in Australia-New Zealand, 1 in Colombia, 1 in Finland and one in France.
In the coming months Spain, England, Russia and other countries will join us in forming the social base for a harmonious and peaceful development of the readers and believers in the 5th Revelation. “The consciousness of being a member of the family of believers inevitably leads to practicing the precepts of good family conduct, the service of brothers and sisters in the effort to enhance and develop brotherhood” (UB 170:3.9)
¶ Australia & New Zealand
ANZURA, the local IUA association is organising a conference near Sydney from 3rd to 6th October 1997 on the theme “What is Daring? Dare to Dream. Dare to Create. Dare to Live.” Further information can be obtained by faxing Rita on 049634 888. (preceded by the Australian country code) or by writing to ANZURA, PO Box 609, Narrabeen NSW 2101 AUSTRALIA.
¶ Readers’ meeting organized by the A.F.L.L.U from Saturday September 20, 1997 at 10:00 a.m. to Sunday September 21 at 6:00 p.m.
Location: Retreat Center of the Lazarist Fathers, 7 rue du Baron de Nièvre 91140 VILLEBON-SUR-YVETTE
The center is located in the Villebon castle (12th century) in the center of a 15-hectare park. It is intended for spiritual and philosophical study groups.
Access:
- SNCF train station: 3 km from Palaiseau-Villebon (RER B4 St Rémy les Cheuvreuses)
- Airport: 10 km from Paris-Orly
- Road axis: A10 Villebon exit
Theme: The fruits of the spirit and more generally human fraternity.
“To science God is a possibility, to psychology a desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a certainty, an actuality of religious experience. Reason demands that a philosophy which cannot find the God of probability should be very respectful of that religious faith which can and does find the God of certitude. Neither should science discount religious experience on grounds of credulity, not so long as it persists in the assumption that man’s intellectual and philosophic endowments emerged from increasingly lesser intelligences the further back they go, finally taking origin in primitive life which was utterly devoid of all thinking and feeling.” (UB 102:6.8)
Accommodation: Twin room that can accommodate only one person. Showers and toilets on the same floor. Possibility to bring your own sheets (save 25 F), bath linen to bring imperatively.
Possibility of arriving on Friday evening (night supplement 40 F) and having dinner on site (meal supplement 50 F).
- Adults full board (sheets provided): 265 F X __ = __ F
- Adults full board (without sheets): 240 F X __ = __ F
- Children — 12 years full board (sheets provided): 230 F X __ = __ F
- Children — 12 years full board (without sheets): 205 F X __ = __ F
- Night supplement + meal on Friday evening 90 F X __ = __ F
- Night supplement without meals on Friday 40 F X __ = __ F
- Total __ F
Vegetarian Meals (circle your choice):
Other formula (half-board; one meal less, etc.) specify:
Payment and registration before August 29, a response before July 15 (even without payment) would be appreciated.
To photocopy, complete and return to A.F.L.L.U — 8, passage de la Bonne Graine -75011 Paris.
¶ References
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 4 — Summer 1997 | The American justice system rules in favor of copyright on appeal |